Speaker, Presidency University
Sukanya Sarbadhikary is Professor of Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata. She
works at the interface of the anthropology of religion, anthropology of embodiment and
materiality, religious studies, and philosophy. She locates the body, senses, intuition,
experience, imagination, and consecration in the interstices of everyday natural and cultural
lives, and strong philosophical traditions. She is also trying to merge these concerns with
imminent understandings of planetary anxieties. Her first book, an ethnography of Bengal-
Vaishnava aesthetic sacrality, The Place of Devotion (University of California Press), was
published in 2015. She is also passionately interested in South Asian aesthetics and music, and
their relations with sacred embodiment. She has thus also published on a range of devotional
instruments, the communities involved in their making, playing, listening, meditating, and
associated traditions of sonic metaphysics. She has published her interdisciplinary work in several journals including the Contributions to Indian Sociology, Modern Asian Studies, Religions, EPW, South Asian History and Culture, Journal of Hindu Studies, Journal of Dharma Studies, and contributed to more than ten edited collections. She is currently
preparing a monograph on the overlaps of the marine and social lives of the turbinella pyrum (domestic conch).
1 talk or class
